


as long as you're mine

by Anonymous



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Dark, Episode: s02e01 Shadows, F/M, Not A Fix-It, Not a Love Story, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:48:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3282563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Thank you for your cooperation.</i>
</p>
<p>Skye's interrogation of Ward, revisited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as long as you're mine

**Author's Note:**

> Written back in the day, as a commentary on the Skye-Coulson-Ward dynamic in the season 2 premiere "Shadows". Coulson's leadership style -- sending Skye in to talk to Ward explicitly _against her will_ \-- made me very uncomfortable. I wasn't (and still am not) pleased with Skye's lack of agency. Many things about Ward's portrayal, starting with the conditions he was being kept in, made me uncomfortable. 
> 
> In hindsight/after the first half of the season, I still think this isn't too far a stretch from the subtext present in that episode.
> 
> Title taken, very ironically, from _Wicked_. Italicized quotes taken directly from the episode. Please be aware of the warnings.
> 
>  
> 
> edit to add: anyone who's coming across this story, I'd love to know how and where you found it? it's pretty far back in the tags now, so.

* * *

_You sure about this? Giving Ward exactly what he wants._

* * *

They haven’t turned the cameras off. Skye had asked them to, last time, and they’d said they would, but there the lights in the corners are still on, blinking steadily. No doubt Coulson and Koenig and May are upstairs, watching her and Ward, in case he lets something slip while otherwise occupied. She’ll have to remember to hack into the system and turn off the cameras herself next time.

Ward’s hands on her are clammy as he touches her, on her face, her neck, her shoulder, and lower. His beard prickles on the side of her neck. Skye lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling, and waits for him to finish. He’s usually talkative when she first comes to the cell, but he’ll often dole out some more information after he comes, in that sex-glazed moment of contentment and self-delusion. Last time he’d given them a list of undercover HDYRA operatives in the US government, and this — she — is his reward.

* * *

_I guess that visit was the first of many, huh._

* * *

She thinks she’s used to him, but one day he tries to kiss her, and she realizes: he can take many liberties with her, but not that, never again. She’s fallen this far, let him take what he wants, but the intimacy of a kiss, face to face, mouth to mouth, is too much. Ward is trying to reclaim the memory of earlier days — a kiss in the closet at the Hub, those kisses at Providence base, before and after she realized — no.

She lashes out, pries him off her with undiscovered strength and throws him off the bed.

“Let me out, Coulson,” she says hoarsely. “You won’t be getting anything out of him today.” It’s true in more than one way: judging from the way Ward’s curled up on himself, she managed to kick him in a particularly sensitive spot. Surely he’ll let her out now; there will be other times (oh, how well she knows that).

The cameras’ lights wink down at them, but the speakers remain silent. There’s no sense of the gears shifting to indicate the door’s locks preparing to open.

Ward looks at her with those vacant eyes. Skye shudders, and wraps the dirty sheet around her bare shoulders.

“Coulson, please,” she says. “I know you’re watching. Let me out. I can get the intel later—”

Silence, gaping monstrously between them. She can feel the blood rushing in her temples. Ward’s gaze rests heavily on her, drinking in the sight of her in vulnerable dishabille. For all that he’s been fucking her ever since they moved him to the cell under the Playground, he’s never seen her like this, naked, for any length of time.

She draws away from him and presses herself up close against the wall. The sheet is a paltry defense, damp against her skin, but it’s better than nothing. Her clothes are far across the room, and she’d have to step onto the floor — Ward’s territory, now — to get them. She’ll wait.

It’s not the nudity she minds, particularly — she’d been sleeping with Miles, and happily, at that — but the possessive way Ward looks at her. He’s getting off on this, she thinks, with a dull flush of horror. He shifts his position, preparing to get up off the floor, and she tenses. I’ll claw his eyes out, she thinks desperately — I will, I’ll kill him if he tries anything. Wouldn’t you like that, Coulson?

Ward raises his hands then, as if calming a spooking horse, before he settles back down again onto the floor. He continues to stare at her. Skye looks away and determinedly blinks her tears away, avoiding his gaze and the blinking lights of the camera lenses alike.

After everything they’ve done, it’s a kiss that breaks her. May must be so proud, she thinks, biting her lip. She and Ward had been sleeping together before. Maybe they can trade stories once she gets out of this cell. That is, if Coulson ever lets her out of there. The world outside the Playground, outside SHIELD, beyond the shadows Coulson is inhabiting now, has never seemed so distant.

“I love you,” Ward rasps. “I want to help. I wish you’d see that.”

_Just give us your intel,_ she wants to say, but the words stick in her throat. The wall has never been so interesting. She can almost see the patterns Coulson keeps drawing, she thinks with a flash of rising hysteria. Hypergraphia, his other obsession.

Finally, Ward brings her her clothes, unbidden, ending their undeclared stalemate. He even turns away politely as Skye draws her jeans and T-shirt back on. She doesn’t bother with her underwear, and the denim wears on her abraded skin. She doesn’t know why she bothers wearing street clothes down here. Next time, they might as well send her down in the same sort of prison wear that Ward’s in. Easier to remove, and a better reflection of her real status here.

By the time she’s dressed, Ward has drawn closer to her, kneeling on the floor by her legs. “There’s a weapons cache on Governors Island,” he says, almost gently. “Tell Coulson to check the tunnels.”

The cell’s locks click, finally. Skye bolts up from the bed. Ward stops her with a hand on her shoulder after she’s stood up from the bed, and leans in to kiss her. It’s easier to tolerate with her clothes on, a tangible layer of protection. She stands there and endures, thinking, very fixedly, about the shower she’ll take after she gets out of here.

After Coulson lets her out, he doesn’t say anything to her about what happened inside the cell that day. She doesn’t bring up the subject, either. Ward never tries to kiss her after that day. She’d hate him for it — when did _he_ get the power, between the two of them? — but she’ll take these small mercies when she can get them.

* * *

_I told Coulson weeks ago that I was willing to speak to you. To give you intelligence. Why now?_

* * *

The first time is the worst. Coulson has sent her down to talk to Ward a few times, with reasonably successful results, but apparently that isn’t enough. He’s been pushing her, recently, dropping hints about how she could improve her interrogation techniques and reminding her constantly of how important the information she gets from Ward is.

There isn’t any indication that this time will be different. She’s given a topic to pump Ward on (distribution of Hydra-appropriated SHIELD assets) and sent down with her tablet, just like usual.  Coulson looks at her a little more contemplatively than usual, perhaps, and Koenig doesn’t bother giving her the usual excited description of the cell’s safety features.

( _You_ _’ll be safe, I promise_ , he’d said. What a joke.)

She and Ward have set up a routine, of sorts, of how these interrogations go. He gets so much time to be creepy before she cuts him off and he actually starts giving information. She steps up to where she knows the laser barrier is to show him the picture displayed on her tablet, like usual. He steps closer to the invisible line, like usual — and the laser barrier doesn’t appear.

The laser barrier doesn’t appear.

Skye steps back quickly and jabs at her tablet. Nothing happens. Ward stays where he is and raises an ironic eyebrow.

“Koenig?” she says. The cameras are on, she knows they are — they must be watching her now upstairs on the feed. They’ll send help. “Billy? AC? Anybody?”

Nothing happens. She taps a message on her tablet — _systems down, alert_ — to no response, either.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” says Ward almost cheerfully as he leans forward. Skye gives up her pose of nonchalance ( _control the environment_ , first principle of interrogating hostiles) and backs up rapidly until she hits the back of the cell.

She screams herself hoarse for help that isn’t coming.

( _Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes._ )

Ward gives her the intel after, of course; he’d understood the implied deal the moment the barrier failed to come up. He’s generous, unusually forthcoming and cooperative, and Coulson smiles at her when she finally leaves the cell (when they finally let her out). “Thank you, Skye,” he says, smiling the same smile he’d worn when he sent her in.

“Why?” she asks.

“You know our situation,” he says. “What you’re doing here, it’s saving lives. We have a responsibility, you know that. These are innocent people. We have to keep him cooperative, for their sake.”

_And me? Don’t I count?_ she thinks. _After all this time, everything we’ve been through._ She saved him from Hydra once, but she can’t see that man in the man who stands before her now.

She only says, “You could have told me before.”

“I did tell you before, the first time I sent you in. You’re the only one who can do this.”

There isn’t anything she can say to that. She excuses herself silently and retreats to her room. She’d been sharing with Simmons out of a desire for company rather than lack of space; she wishes Simmons were still here now. Anything would be better than the echoing silence yawning around her.

She runs the shower too hot and too long trying to erase the silence and the memory of his hands ( _liar traitor murderer_ ) on her, and scrubs her skin raw in the process.

Ward runs his fingers over those marks the next time she’s sent in to him, and smiles.

* * *

_We kept Ward here for this reason, and it's paying off._

Skye is used to the cameras by now.

_And do I have a say in this?_


End file.
